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I do think it's strange that I get associated with Iraq more than the people who were Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. It's because of my closeness to Tony [Blair], which I don't regret at all. I think that was a privilege.

Alastair Campbell

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Alastair Campbell
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 25
Diarist
Journalist
Novelist
Politician
Keighley
West Yorkshire
Alastair John Campbell
People
Secretary
Foreign
Privilege
Iraq
Closeness
Regret
Blair
Strange
Tony
Think
Defence
Thinking
Associated

More quotes by Alastair Campbell

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The royal family's existence is a constant reminder of the hollowness of John Major's rhetoric, and idiotic statements by its leading members a constant boost to the republican cause. They're fine opening hospitals. It's when they open their mouths they get into trouble.
Alastair Campbell
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My closest friend, who died not long ago, is buried near Marx's grave in Highgate cemetery, so I see the gaggle of admirers laying roses at the foot of his tombstone regularly. I have never been tempted to leave flowers there myself. Great theories, shame about the practice. Marx did many things. But inventing class was not one of them.
Alastair Campbell
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For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said.
Alastair Campbell
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He [Tony Blair] was always ambivalent about the [Rupert] Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the chance to believe it was just about 'The Independent.' And that was wrong.
Alastair Campbell
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Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.
Alastair Campbell
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Paul Keating told us before we were elected that you can do deals with [Rupert] Murdoch without saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we had to do something about media ownership and self-regulation. Tony [Blair] disagreed.
Alastair Campbell
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I'm certainly driven, I hate losing, I can be ruthless and short-tempered and terribly competitive.
Alastair Campbell
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In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness.
Alastair Campbell
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One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.
Alastair Campbell
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What concerns me is that the Independent is going, and there are job cuts at the Guardian, but the wretched Daily Mail is still rampant, making lots of money by millions of people clicking on pictures of cellulited women. I think that's sad.
Alastair Campbell
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Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.
Alastair Campbell
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There is something in me that makes me see things through.
Alastair Campbell
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My aunty says I'm the double of my father. He was a workaholic, which I've definitely inherited. And like me, he could be the life and soul of the party, but also quite withdrawn.
Alastair Campbell
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Greg Dyke is on record as saying that once the BBC was attacked, it was their job to defend themselves. But that is not their job.
Alastair Campbell
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I remember talking to Alex Ferguson about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown], and he said: Why doesn't Tony just get rid of him? But if you sack someone in football, they can't turn up to training the next day. In politics they're still on the pitch. Gordon would still have been a big player.
Alastair Campbell
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We should confine booing in sports arenas to sport. I love a good boo as much as the next football fan.
Alastair Campbell
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May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.
Alastair Campbell
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So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.
Alastair Campbell
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One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people.
Alastair Campbell
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The day of the daredevil reporter who refuses to see obstacles to getting the truth, and seeing it with his or her own eyes, seems to have died.
Alastair Campbell